


Drifting Along

by end_alls



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020)
Genre: FF7R Spoilers, M/M, Speculation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-13
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:06:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26451574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/end_alls/pseuds/end_alls
Summary: FF7R SpoilersAfter FF7R, Cloud starts to briefly drift into points of the timeline where Zack lived. However, without the right memories to work from, Cloud is mostly just super confused as to why he’s hallucinating a black-haired man who’s really nice to him and also kind of hot???
Relationships: Zack Fair/Cloud Strife
Comments: 14
Kudos: 66





	Drifting Along

Tifa’s gloves made a soft PAP! as she clapped them together. “Well! Let’s get some rest! We’ve got a big day tomorrow! Set your alarms for 6am sharp—we’ll be on the road by 7!”

Cloud and Barret exchanged a weary look in the hotel lobby, but held back any protests. It was useless to argue with someone who still had a such a heaping supply of pep after a whole day fighting the monsters that had infested this section of the highway.

“Will you be all right on your own, Cloud?” Aerith asked kindly as she offered him his room key. “I can trade with you if you want to bunk with Tifa instead.”

Cloud took it. “No—thanks. The single room is fine.”

“It better be, ‘cause I’m not givin’ up the room with the TV,” Barret added, pocketing his. “If you think I’m gonna miss an episode of Marlene’s favorite show tonight, then you’ve got another thing comin’.”

“Do you think Kipper will find his friend this week?“ Red XIII asked gruffly.

“I’d say we’re about to find out,” Barret said, giving Red XIII a ruffle around the ears that he didn’t protest to. “We’ll catch you all tomorrow. Bright and early, like Tifa said.”

The party parted ways, with Tifa and Aerith chatting about their evening routines, Barret assuring Red XIII that Kipper was going to be “just fine”, and Cloud bracing himself for what felt like an oncoming migraine. Once he reached his room, he kicked off his shoes and flopped onto the bed, tired and achy enough to fall directly asleep, and dream without nightmares.

The chimes of the 6:00 am phone alarm sounded off, ringing much more cheerfully than anything should be at this hour, and just before Cloud could wrench his bleary eyes open, a man’s voice groaned, “Noooo…” as an arm reached over him to fumblingly turn off the alarm. Cloud’s eyes shot open, head swiveling against his pillow.

There was a man in the bed with him. There was a _naked_ —no, wait, he just had his shirt off— _man in the bed with him_. His sharp, jet black hair had fallen slightly forward from where it had been slicked back, and after turning off the phone alarm, he’d left his warm arm draped across Cloud’s chest.

Cloud laid there, frozen stiff, staring at the man’s sleeping face and trying to figure out where the hell he’d come from and why the hell he was spooning him, but his memory, as usual, proved absolutely fucking useless. Had there been some mixup with the rooms? Had the man invited himself in? Actually—had Cloud invited _him_ in? He _was_ pretty good-looking, and—Cloud didn’t even know why he was considering the possibility.

Pinned as he was, he couldn’t lean up far enough to check for a second person’s belongings in the room, and he didn’t want to wake the man by shifting around too much—though he was just as likely to wake him with the absolutely thundering sound of his heartbeat kicking against his ribs where the man’s arm was so comfortably draped.

Cloud knew he could and _should_ wake him, but for some reason he didn’t want to. Asleep, the dark-haired man had a funny sort of quirk at the edge of his mouth, like he was having a nice dream, and pretty black eyelashes sat soft and flush against his cheeks. Cloud listened to him breathe in and out, and eventually, his own breathing slowed. His eyes lolled.

“CLOUD!”

A banging on the door catapulted him out of bed and up onto the floor. The man—

Cloud spun around the room, but there was no trace of him. The sheets were even partially tucked in on the side he’d been laying on. Had he left without even saying goodbye? Cloud’s thoughts were interrupted by another round of banging, and he scrambled to remove the chain and unlock the door.

Tifa stood there, fist poised to knock straight into his head. She huffed. “Cloud! It’s 6:15! Did you snooze your alarm?”

Cloud tried to lean past her into the hallway. “Did you—Did you see a guy?”

Tifa rested her hands on her hips and followed his gaze down the hall. “Um, I don’t think so…? What kind of guy?”

“Short black hair.”

“A lot of guys have short black hair…” Tifa considered. “We can ask at the front if you want. Oh! Maybe Aerith saw someone?”

Cloud deflated as the rest of his lucidity kicked in. “Nevermind. It’s nothing.” It was probably just a dream, or vision, or—well, it was pretty far removed from any sort of nightmare he’d ever had.

“Wipe that sleep out of your eyes and get dressed, okay?” she said, giving him a wink. “If you don’t hurry, Barret’ll clean out the continental breakfast and there won’t be any bacon left for you.” She gave his nose a boop, turned, and left.

Pulling back into the room, Cloud’s eyes caught the chain on the door. He’d had to remove it to open the door for Tifa, which meant it would have been impossible for a mystery visitor to have left and still locked it behind him.

Whatever it was, it hadn’t been real.

Cloud’s chest sank. One more thing to worry about.

The next time was even weirder. Cloud was zoning out, eating a bowl of soup at a roadside restaurant when someone else shoved their spoon in his mouth. Suddenly, it was like his body didn’t belong to him—like he was trapped behind his eyes, watching the world from far away.

The person feeding him was the black-haired man, whose chair was scooted close enough for their knees to touch. “She is going to have a _fit,”_ he was saying as he gingerly gave Cloud another spoonful of soup. “I don’t call, don’t respond to like, a _zillion_ letters, and then I just show up out of the blue with you in tow?”

Cloud said nothing. He couldn’t speak.

The man smiled at him all the same, and used the corner of a napkin to wipe his mouth. This close, his eyes were inescapably blue. “She’ll like you, though—I know she will. And we’ll have you back in ship-shape in no time.”

“Z… Za…” His throat was trying to form a word, but it was too full of soup to make it out.

“You gonna finish that, or just sit there all checked-out?”

Barret was offering Cloud the spoon he’d dropped, and the black-haired man was gone. Cloud shook out his head, then took the spoon. “Y-Yeah. Yeah, sure.”

He was about to get back to his soup when Barret stopped him. “Hey man, don’t use that one—it fell on the floor.” Barret’s next breath came as a sigh through his nose when Cloud just stared at him. “Look, I’ll get you another.” The chair squeaked as he stood, and as Cloud stared at his reflection in the dirty spoon, his eyes looked empty and glowing.

They moved on, deeper into the desert between Midgar and Kalm where the roads became unpaved and the monsters roamed more freely. They’d split into two groups to clear a path forward—Barret, Cloud, and Aerith taking down a large group of monsters while Tifa and Red XIII picked off more scattered ones.

They’d nearly finished off their group of monsters when one knocked Cloud backwards, sending him sprawling into the dirt. He lay there a moment, head spinning and disoriented, until a gloved hand grasped his. “Upsy-daisy!” A strong arm wrenched him back to his feet, then clapped him on the back. “You got this, man!”

Cloud stared blankly as the black-haired man whirled around to cleave into the nearest monster… with a familiar-looking buster sword. Before Cloud could get a good look at it, another monster screeched, making a lunge for the man, and Cloud aimed to attack it.

A bullet rang out, felling the creature, and Cloud looked down at the rifle that had appeared in his hands. The one he’d just used to kill the monster, with impeccable aim. He looked back at the black-haired man, who gave him a thumbs-up with one hand as his other held what was definitely _Cloud’s_ buster sword. He drove the sword into the monster Cloud had staggered, and then it was Cloud’s hands on the hilt, and he was pulling the sword back out of the dirt.

Barret grumbled as Aerith helped him up from where he’d fallen. “I’ve had just about enough of all this dirt.” He used his hand to dust off his pants.

“Did you see him?” Cloud asked, breathless and lost.

“See who?” Barret removed his sunglasses to blow them off, then replaced them on his face.

“Was it Sephiroth…?” Aerith asked cautiously.

“No, it—”

“Hey!” Tifa was jogging towards them, Red XIII a little ahead of her. “Nice work out there!”

“Tifa,” Cloud turned to her, almost desperately. “You saw me hit it?”

Tifa trotted to a stop, then nodded. “Yeah, saw you finish it off!” She mimed driving the sword downwards. “Yah!”

“It was strange, though—” Red XIII added. “Just before, it stumbled as if it’d been struck by a projectile.”

“My arm musta’ misfired when the other one knocked me down,” Barret suggested, and Cloud told himself it was the truth.

The black-haired man continued to appear, always when Cloud was least prepared to process it. He caught sight of him at twilight, untying the laces of his boots in a chair, or as he was waking, pulling a knit shirt over his toned shoulders. Even in the times when Cloud managed to speak, he’d say things he couldn’t hear, and the black haired man would respond with something that didn’t make sense, or chuckle and throw a sock at him. But whenever Cloud caught the black-haired man’s eye, his smile would light up his sky-blue eyes, and words wouldn’t matter at all.

Pleasant as they were, the visions were unpredictable and intrusive—practically taking him bodily out of whatever he was doing. Maybe after one nightmare too many, his brain had finally been forced to stitch together a new segment that only functioned to make his mind dream and heart flutter.

And at the same time the black-haired man seemed too realized, too casually human to be a creation of Cloud’s subconscious. If he was a complete fantasy, his visits wouldn’t be so brief, and he’d spend more time with his blue eyes too close to Cloud’s, the breath off his laughs brushing Cloud’s cheeks.

In the sad pit of his heart, Cloud briefly wondered if the black-haired man was someone who’d died, but hadn’t been able to return to the planet. And if Cloud was being haunted, it was by the nicest ghost in the Lifestream.

Cloud had his knees tucked up to his chest, sitting on top of a big rock outside their campsite. He watched Aerith walking his way from the low light of the campfire. She hiked up her skirt, got a foothold in the rock, and climbed up next to him.

The two of them sat in silence for a time, and then she asked, “Cloud, have you been doing okay? Not sleeping well enough?”

Cloud had been sleeping better than ever, with the black-haired man’s appearances replacing most of his nightmares. “I guess I keep… thinking… about this guy.” Aerith was easier to talk to than the others—maybe even easier than Tifa, who tended to make him worry that he was worrying her.

“A guy, huh?” Aerith said cheekily. “Think you can get any more specific than that?”

“Um…” Cloud was quickly losing faith that he could actually talk about this without sounding nuts.

“Do I know him?”

Cloud didn’t even know him. But if he didn’t tell _someone_ about this, he was starting to think he actually _would_ go nuts. “I saw him the other day. He’s got this… raven black hair, and he smiles a lot.” Then, “He has a nice smile.” An unintentional addition, but considering how fast his heart was starting to pound at the thought of it, he decided he’d managed pretty well. It was a totally neutral thing to say. A lot of people had nice smiles. Aerith had a nice smile, and right now it was getting big enough for her teeth to show. But she didn’t say anything, just nodded for him to go on.

“He was really nice to me, and…” Cloud was coming to realize how embarrassing this all sounded. He looked away. “…I don’t know what’s going on.”

“This guy with the black hair…” Aerith’s saccharine smile turned a little devious, as it sometimes did. “Do you like him?”

“No—” Cloud said immediately, but Aerith’s eyebrow raised accusingly as they both heard the word ring false. Cloud took a breath. “…Yes,” he conceded.

Aerith laughed brightly, but not mockingly. “Cloud,” she said, placing her hand on his arm and leaning in conspiratorially, “it sounds to me like you and I have the same taste in men.”

Cloud’s face went hot. _“What?”_

She just laughed again. “The first guy I had a crush on—” Cloud’s head became fuzzy then, probably at the inference that what he had was a _crush,_ “—he was the same deal. Shiny black hair, and the sweetest smile in Midgar.”

Aerith let out a sigh. “I still think about him. See him, sometimes.” She shrugged her shoulders, and looked back at Cloud. “I dunno. It’s hard to forget people who drop into your life like that,” she finished, with a private giggle to herself.

“So…” Cloud said. “You think I…”

“You have a crush? I mean, I’d have to see it in action to be certain, but it sure sounds like it.”

“On a guy?” Cloud’s brow furrowed.

“Have you not had a crush on a guy before?” Aerith asked curiously.

Cloud shook his head with certainty, and then frowned, with less certainty. He hadn’t felt…nothing, dancing with Andrea Rhodea at the Honeybee Inn, but beyond that, his head was such a mess it was hard to remember. “…I guess I don’t know.”

Aerith squeezed his glove. “It’s okay not to know, too.”

Cloud returned her kind smile.

“I’m going to turn in.” She patted his hand once more, then stood and straightened her dress. “Promise me you’ll come get some sleep in a bit?”

“Sure.”

“Kay.” She gave his hair a little ruffle, then hopped off the rock, pink dress momentarily poofing out like a parachute. Cloud smirked and raised his eyes back to the stars, listening to her boots crunch the dirt as she walked back towards the others. Out here, the sky was as wide and clear as any sky he’d seen growing up in Nibelheim, and he wished he could be back there now.

“Do you believe in fate?” the black-haired man asked. “Or like, destiny?”

It sounded like he was right beside him, but Cloud didn’t look—in case it would make him disappear sooner.

“Like do we all have a story that’s written for us, and no matter what we do, it always ends the same?”

Cloud didn’t want to think about it.

“I’ve been having these thoughts lately,” the man said. “Like, is this how it’s supposed to go? Is this how it’s supposed to be?”

He laughed. “Man, I probably sound real ungrateful or something, huh? I mean, I’m not complaining!”

Cloud’s mouth pursed, not knowing whether it was because he wanted to laugh, or cry.

“But I just can’t shake this itch in the back of my head. I dunno what it is. I should probably just get over it, right?”

Cloud’s chest felt so heavy, like he was about to be crushed by the rain of a heavy downpour, and get pulled down in a mudslide.

“Whatever it is, though, I know we’ll make it through.” The man’s fist gently batted his arm. “After all, we’re together.”

Cloud’s eyes blurred with tears, and in the yawning silence he knew the black-haired man was gone again.

**Author's Note:**

> With Zack as a party member it’d be cool if Cloud went back to using guns.. maybe dual wielding with a regular sword or something now that he’s all soaked in Mako… nice
> 
> AND BOY DO I LOVE SOME TIMELINE SPECULATION... I think Cloud would be most susceptible to these jumps when he's tired or out of it, but unfortunately for cloud, that happens to be "often".
> 
> This also jumps around in time cause I figure with the right conditions, Cloud could align with different points along the timeline. Maybe that’s even why the FF7R ending showed 2 points in time in the same place—Zack and Cloud going to Midgar as Cloud & the gang leave. Both are a triumph after a big fight, both happen in a similar location, and then the rain is the final element that aligns them.  
> ANYWAY… WHATEVER’S GOING ON THERE… I’m so looking forward to what they do in the next entry in the FF7R series!
> 
> Finishing FF7R really revved up my Clack engine and I’m working on another Crisis Core era fic too! As for this one, going to set it as multi chapter, but I’m not sure what updates will look like since I haven’t mapped things out beyond this. We’ll see!
> 
> If you wanna hang on twitter, I’m at [toppiegames](https://twitter.com/toppiegames)!


End file.
